The Daily Kos has published the Tom Tomorrow cartoon Press conference.

I repost this cartoon because I believe the cartoonist expressed what I think better than I ever could have.

The cartoonist has a subscription page, Sparky’s List, where you can help support the cartoonist.

Read my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – Refresher Course to see my suggestion for how authors on the internet could be paid for their efforts.

The July 31 Edition of The Town Common has the article Alleged union job talk spurs ethics complaint.  The article is on the last page.

STURBRIDGE – An ethics complaint filed last week by the town manager against Zoning Board of Appeals member Christopher Mattioli got its start with a chance meeting at the gym.
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Patel went further in a recent interview with the Town Common.  He said Mattioli also approached him about his project and Patel’s plan to use non-union labor. Patel said he felt intimidated by Mattioli.

I am a supporter of the value that unions bring to our society, and I would like to see the laws rebalanced to bring back some of the power of the unions that has been under attack since before 1980.  I was also hoping that Christopher Mattioli would have a successful tenure on the Zoning Board of Appeals.  However, I do not support the people on the town boards using that position to further personal goals over the good of the Sturbridge community.  If, in fact, that is what Mr. Mattioli did, then I am strongly opposed to such behavior.

When I first came to Sturbridge I supported a candidate who promised to bring the views of local business people to the Board of Selectmen.  His behavior on the board appeared to me to represent his own personal business interests to the detriment of the interests of competing local business people. That decided me to never vote for that Selectman again.

I cite this case just to show that my standard for local office holders is looking out for the best interests of the town and its citizens.  My support is not based on party politics, business versus labor, nor class, nor any other side issue.  I would hope that the majority of citizens in Sturbridge would put the best interests of the town at the top of their priorities when voting for  candidates for office.  Of course, I realize that people can have legitimate differences over what is best for the town, and that is why we have elections.

Elizabeth Warren posted on her Facebook page a graphic from The Huffington Post article At Least $128 Billion in Bank Settlements Since ’09.

Warren’s comment began with the following:

Since 2009, the big banks and financial institutions have paid at least $128 billion to regulators for the tricks and traps that brought down our economy. But they are happy to pay the fines – in fact, JP Morgan gave its CEO Jamie Dimon a 74% raise for negotiating its settlement. If these settlements are so weak that Wall Street is celebrating, it’s not a good deal for the American people.

One trait that I like about Elizabeth Warren is her ability to find an easy to understand observation that simplifies separating truth from fiction. In this case it is the observation that if a company celebrates a decision that seems to go against them, then it can’t really be all that bad for them.

One similar observation came to my mind many years ago when the CEO’s of companies were complaining how the rules and regulations and taxes were killing business and sending them to the poor house. I thought, “when I see CEOs brown-bagging their lunches, then maybe I will start to believe them.”

This is one of several ads that Don Berwick has run.

This is the kind of ad that I think it is important for candidates to run. Not only does it promote his candidacy, but it also promotes an idea for action. He tells you what the idea is and the benefits that will accrue from implementing it. It attempts to get the positive benefits of the idea into the public forum no matter what is the outcome for his own political campaign.

The Martha Coakley campaign for Governor of Massachusetts has come out with her first ad of the campaign.

It is a good ad. (It could use an audible period at the end of the sentence before the narrator starts talking about the people fighting against her, but that’s a very minor issue, I think.)

She seems to be way ahead in the polls for the primary coming up in early September. I presume this is why she has waited so long to air an ad. I hope she doesn’t wait so long in the general election campaign if she wins the primary.

Naked Capitalism has the book review Summer Rerun: Attack of the Blob – How Professional Democrats and Professional Republicans Ran America Into the Ground.

This is a review of the new book by former Senate staffer and super-lobbyist Jeff Connaughton, Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins. The review is written by Matt Stoller, who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller

There’s a slate of important books coming out by reformers this year on what it was like to fight, and lose, for better policy during the financial reform fight. Neil Barofsky talked about facing the administration and Wall Street in Bailout, Sheila Bair has written about her experience at the FDIC, and now former Senate chief of staff for reform Senate Ted Kaufman, Jeff Connaughton, has provided his own memoir. Connaughton is not a rube, and doesn’t pretend to be shocked by DC corruption. His whole career is an anomaly, an idealist turned corporate super-lobbyist in the 1990s turned unlikely reformer in 2009. As such, he is uniquely positioned to describe how our political leaders, and which political leaders, think and act.

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Most books on politics with a polemical edge end with some sort of uplifting narrative. The narrative goes, here’s this insurmountable terrible problem, but we can fix it, somehow, somewhere. The Payoff is not like that.
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Sometimes, circumstances and a conscience can intrude at opportune moments. It seems like that’s what happened with Connaughton and his remarkable last two years. And now, he has quit the game, with this book — and perhaps “The Blob”, which may join the vernacular – as his legacy. He tried his best for two years, and it wasn’t enough. The fight is over, and the bad guys won. It’s a sad conclusion for someone like Connaughton, and for all those who fought the good fight over the last four years. But it’s hard to argue he’s wrong.

Finally a book without the obligatory and disappointing final chapter on how to fix the problem.

Naked Capitalism has the article Hillary Clinton: The Goldwater Girl Reveals Herself in an Atlantic Interview.

What was striking about Hillary Clinton’s remarks, which to its credit, the Atlantic reproduced in full, was how often she depicted the US policy of aggression as morally desirable as well as necessary to protect Christians in the US from jihadis. Funny how the officialdom airbrushes out of the picture the fact that Osama Bin Laden explained the reason for his campaign against the US, and his overarching reason was “Because you attack us and continue to attack us.” I’m no supporter of Arab extremists, but the US has long meddled this region, with perilous little finesse or concern for the long-term ramifications. But it’s simpler for politicians like Hillary Clinton to narrow the frame so as to make those who oppose the US look like cartoon bad guys. Consider this section from her interview:

One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States. Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’être is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.

This is almost enough to convince me that it is very unlikely that I could ever vote for Hillary Clinton for President.

However, if you read The Atlantic article Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS, she almost makes a convincing case. One thing I have to keep reminding myself is that she is presenting the case for her conclusions after filtering out all the facts that would put doubts into the thinking about those conclusions.   She falls too much into the trap of thinking that being in the presence of people (and negotiating with them)  gives you enough insight into understanding what motivates them.  Maybe what helps you disabuse yourself of the idea is to have the experience that I have had in telling people what you think motivates them and then having them explain how far off your assumptions are by them telling you what really motivates them. (Of course, there is no guarantee that what they tell you about their motivations is in fact completely reliable.)

I can imagine one of perhaps the few possible approaches to avoid the trap is to consider all possible motivations. It may be best to devise a strategy that tests the more likely motivations until you find something that seems to work. So far we seem to have found only strategies that lead to disaster.

If our politicians and the voters don’t seem to be able to find a strategy that gets Democrats and Republicans to work together, what chance do we have with people we understand even less?

A Class Action Suit Against The 113th Congress By We The People is a petition you might want to sign.

we petition the Obama administration to:

A Class Action Suit Against The 113th Congress By We The People

It is up to the American people to take back our Country from those politicians, who would have as their priorities, political gains/plays; rather than representation of their constituents. Congress is in violation of the Constitution, as this body has been entrusted with sacred fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of the People; sworn an oath; yet is on track to become the least productive Congress in history. Frivolous spending and wasting of taxpayer dollars on a lawsuit against the President; excessive investigations on IRS and Benghazi; and shutting down the Government are additional shortcomings of this body. Such funds/time could be put to better use-Jobs;Immigration Reform; Border Crisis; Gun Control; Mental Health;Economy; Voting Rights etc. Congress should not be above the law.

I don’t know if it is up to Obama to sue, or it is up to us to sue.  Nevertheless a good idea for turn-about is fair play.  I suppose, if Congress can sue Obama, then Obama can sue Congress.

I have been known to mention two experiences in my life that have made me realize there are two kinds of people.  One experience was real, the other imagined.

The real experience came from my years as a software engineer supporting and developing code for the circuit simulation program called SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis).

Computer programs are broken down into subroutines.  Each subroutine has parameters which are its inputs and outputs.  In Spice, there was seldom an explanation of what a subroutine was trying to accomplish and seldom an explanation of the meaning of its inputs and outputs.  If you knew either what the routine was trying to do or if you knew the meaning of its inputs and outputs, you would have a much easier time figuring out the missing piece of information.  In the case of SPICE, you would start by making some assumptions about the two missing pieces of information, and then go round and round in circles trying to reconcile the two things.  If you succeeded in finding out what was going on, you frequently realized that your initial assumptions on both what the routine was trying to do and the meaning of its inputs and outputs were quite different from what was actually correct.  Of course the effect was multiplied because to figure out what a subroutine did, you had to figure out what the subroutines inside it did.  You were continually going up and down the hierarchy of subroutines trying to make sense of it all.  In bugs I found and fixed in SPICE, I could frequently detect that the person who wrote the bug didn’t fully realize what the routine was trying to do or what the inputs and outputs were supposed to represent.

What I learned from this experience was that I would never write computer programs in this way and inflict this amount of pain on whomever might have to work with the code I had written. As I saw other people work in this domain, it seemed to me these others took a different lesson.  The lesson they seemed to learn was that the code in SPICE was an example of how a PhD student ought to write code and lesser people should aspire to that same style.

The imagined experience was thinking about the hazing rituals in fraternities.  There too, I expect there were two lessons you could take away from that experience.  The one I took away from imagining it is that I would not like to go through that experience, and I would never want to inflict that kind of punishment on anybody else.  The other lesson I suppose you could learn is that if the people who did it to you could get away with it, you were certainly going to take your turn inflicting this on the next set of initiates.

I suspect that you can see these life lessons and my reactions to them reflected in many of the things I post on this blog.